Gene37

Jose Alba stood trapped inside a two-foot space behind a grocery counter in Manhattan while an ex-con on parole grabbed him by the collar. Alba was sixty-one years old and worked late shifts at a corner bodega on Broadway to support his family. He had zero criminal record in his entire life. On the night of July 1, 2022, a customer's card was declined for a bag of chips. Seconds later, her thirty-five-year-old boyfriend, Austin Simon, stormed behind the private employee counter. Simon was on parole for assaulting a police officer and had eight prior arrests. He shoved the sixty-one-year-old clerk into a chair, towered over him in the dead-end aisle, and tried to drag him out. With no back door and nowhere to run, Alba reached for a store box cutter to save his own life. During the struggle, Simon's girlfriend pulled a knife from her own purse and stabbed Alba in the arm. Here is what Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg did next. Bragg's office did not charge the girlfriend who stabbed the clerk. Instead, prosecutors charged sixty-one-year-old Jose Alba with second-degree murder, asked for $500,000 bail, and locked him inside Rikers Island with an untreated stab wound. Hardworking Americans rallied across the country and forced the District Attorney to drop every charge eighteen days later, though Alba was forced to leave his job in fear for his life. A civilization begins to rot the moment its prosecutors protect violent predators and put handcuffs on working men who refuse to die quietly.